If you have opened a federal solicitation this year and felt like you were reading two rulebooks stapled together, you were not imagining it. Since the Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) overhaul began, agencies have been buying under class deviations while the FAR Council works on making the new text official. The result is a generation of solicitations that cite the overhauled FAR in one clause and the old one in the next. Now the Government Accountability Office (GAO) has weighed in, and its answer is one part sympathy and three parts homework.

The decision is Kearney & Company, P.C.; NextGen Federal Systems LLC; Integral Federal, Inc.; Alpha Tech Alliance, LLC, B-424433.14 et al. (Sept. 21, 2026), and it relates to the Army’s Marketplace for the Acquisition of Professional Services procurement, better known as MAPS.

At a Glance

• The intermingling of the codified FAR and class deviations implementing the Revolutionary FAR Overhaul (RFO) is an issue of widespread interest to the procurement community. GAO addressed that issue here under the significant issue exception to its timeliness rules.
• The three untagged clauses were unchanged by the overhaul, so there was no deviation to tag. For FAR clause 52.233-4, the old and overhaul versions stated the same substantive rule, and GAO found no inconsistency or ambiguity.
• GAO’s holding is narrow. It denied the protest because the specific provisions at issue were neither ambiguous nor materially inconsistent. It did not bless mixed solicitations as a category. Where two versions of a clause actually differ, and the difference bears on price or risk, a timely protest has a path.
• GAO dismissed as untimely the challenge to the Army’s use of the old FAR for its consolidation analysis before issuing the solicitation under the new framework. It never reached the merits of that argument.

A $50 Billion Test Case

MAPS folds two existing Army vehicles, RS3 and ITES-3S, into one multiple-award IDIQ with a $50 billion ceiling and roughly 350 planned awards across five service domains. The Army issued the solicitation on April 1, 2026, under the overhauled FAR Part 15, about two weeks after the Department of Defense (DoD) class deviation adopting that part took effect. More than 1,300 proposals came in. So did the protests. GAO’s decision lists some two dozen docket numbers for this one solicitation, including an August decision (Intelligence Consulting Enterprise Solutions, Inc., B-424433.3, B-424433.7, Aug. 11, 2026) that sustained a protest in part and recommended that the Army amend and reopen the solicitation.

This round involved four protesters lodging various challenges against the solicitation’s terms before award. None of them stuck. Most of the decision covers familiar territory, but one section is new.

Two Versions, One Solicitation

One protester was a small-business joint venture that lodged a broad claim that the solicitation incorrectly pointed offerors to outdated FAR provisions that no longer governed in light of the overhaul. The Army answered that the provisions the protester cited appear nowhere in the solicitation, and the protester let the point drop. In its comments, though, it came back with something sharper. Three clauses appeared in its standard FAR form with no deviation tag, namely the data rights clause at 52.227-14, the fixed-price termination for convenience clause at 52.249-2, and the fixed fee clause at 52.216-8. And clause 52.233-4, Applicable Law for Breach of Contract Claim, appeared in both its overhaul version and its old FAR version.

The problem, though, was that the protester raised these issues on August 3, and proposals were due June 22. GAO called that “impermissible and untimely piecemeal presentation of protest issues” under 4 C.F.R. § 21.2(a)(1). Ordinarily that ends the conversation.

It did not end there. GAO invoked the “significant issue” exception in 4 C.F.R. § 21.2(c), which it does not hand out often, and decided the question anyway. In GAO’s words, “[t]he intermingling of the codified FAR and class deviations implementing the RFO in acquisitions being conducted by agencies amidst the ongoing overhaul of the FAR is an issue of widespread interest to the procurement community, and one which our Office has not yet squarely addressed.”

Why the Protester Still Lost

GAO opened by conceding that the MAPS solicitation “is not a model of clarity.” Then it explained why that was good enough. A solicitation has to let offerors compete intelligently and on a common basis, but it does not have to “remove every uncertainty from the mind of every prospective offeror.” On the three untagged clauses, the Army’s answer was simple. The overhaul did not change them, so there is no deviation to tag. GAO checked the overhaul text itself and agreed.

Clause 52.233-4 took more work. The solicitation incorporated the overhaul version directly. The old version comes in through the back door, cross-referenced inside two other deviation clauses, 52.212-5 and 52.213-4. The Army’s explanation deserves attention. It said it lacked the “authority to independently make changes to the language” of those clauses, so the citations to the old FAR clause “had to remain the same.” Put plainly, the deviation text itself points backward, and the Army says it cannot fix it.

GAO then did what offerors will now be expected to do. It laid the two versions side by side. Both say, in a single sentence, that “United States law will apply to resolve any claim of breach of this contract.” The only difference is the regulatory cite that prescribes the clause. Thus, GAO determined that there was no inconsistency and no ambiguity.

The protester’s reply is the best statement of industry’s frustration you will find in a GAO decision. Its point, it said, was never that the text differs but that the solicitation “supplies contradictory regulatory signals” and leaves the offeror to “self-resolve the conflict.” GAO did not quarrel with the diagnosis. It acknowledged that the class deviation process “may result in situations whereby offerors cannot determine based solely on the information contained in the four corners of a solicitation which version of a clause or provision” applies. But it read the protest as “frustration with the systemic lack of clarity in solicitations created by the manner in which the RFO process has unfolded, rather than identifying any concrete regulatory deficiency in the MAPS solicitation.” Frustration, however well earned, is not a protest ground.

What GAO Left Unsaid

First, the holding is narrow. GAO denied the protest because the specific provisions at issue were “neither ambiguous nor materially inconsistent.” It did not bless mixed solicitations as a category. Where two versions of a clause actually differ, and the difference bears on price or risk, a timely protest has a path.

Second, GAO is keeping count. A footnote cites two other recent decisions involving solicitations that mixed FAR and overhaul clauses (LJR Solutions, LLC, B-424487, Aug. 14, 2026, and E-Logic, Inc., B-424566, B-424566.2, Sept. 9, 2026). The same footnote observes that parts 8, 12, 13, 14, 15, and 16, which govern most federal buying, were “[n]otably absent” from the FAR Council’s first four proposed rules. That gap has started to close. The FAR Council published proposed rules reaching those parts on September 18, three days before GAO’s decision was issued, and comments are due October 19. Until final rules arrive, the deviations remain the operating manual.

Third, the harder question went unanswered. The protester also argued that the Army ran its consolidation analysis under the old FAR, because DoD had not yet adopted overhaul Part 7 by class deviation, and then issued the solicitation under the new framework. GAO dismissed that argument as untimely and never reached it. We strongly suspect that an argument like this will resurface in the future at GAO.

The Rest of the Scorecard

The remaining grounds fared no better. GAO upheld the Army’s consolidation determination, which rested on roughly $81 million in savings, plus benefits that are harder to quantify. It rejected the bundling claim in part because approximately 35% of awards are reserved for small businesses. It upheld a pass/fail screen that excludes large businesses with marginal-or-worse ratings on 5% or more of their CPARS elements. And it upheld extra points for third-party CMMC certification, dismissing as untimely another protester’s argument that DoD’s July 13, 2026, suspension of CMMC phase 2 changed the picture.

Five Takeaways for Contractors

1. Read every clause for its tag and date. A deviation tag signals overhaul text. No tag may simply mean the overhaul left the clause alone, which is what happened with three clauses here.

• Do the side-by-side comparison before you complain. GAO pulled the overhaul text and compared it to the codified FAR. You should do the same, because a mixed signal without a material difference will not carry a protest.

• Raise any issues before proposals are due. Ask in Q&A, and if the answer does not resolve a real conflict, consider protesting before the closing date for receipt of proposals to ensure timeliness.

• Put every argument in your first filing and watch the ten-day clock on anything new. GAO charged the protester with notice of a consolidation determination posted on SAM.gov whether or not it had actually seen it, and three of its seven challenges to that determination died on timeliness.

• Write down which version you relied on. If deviation clauses still cross-reference old FAR text and the agency says it cannot change them, the question of which language governs is likely to come back during performance. A proposal file that shows what you priced and why is cheap insurance.

The FAR overhaul was sold as a simplification, and it may yet be one. But for now, contractors are bidding in the gap between two rulebooks, and GAO has made clear that minding that gap is the offeror’s job.